


swimsleep

by birdcat



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Future Fic, M/M, implied iwaoi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:54:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25707742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdcat/pseuds/birdcat
Summary: "D'you mean it?"He’s spent the whole week pushing against it. What he’s doing when he looks at Atsumu. What his eyes do with the image of him, the close-enough, the memory of someone else so easily painted onto what's before him. He fixes his gaze on Atsumu’s chest, lets his vision blur. He’s tall. Lean. Sun-kissed. It's close enough.It won’t make him feel better, and Hajime doesn’t care. He drank himself here deliberately. He wants it anyways.“Yeah,” Hajime says. “I mean it.”Iwaizumi, and a couple years of distance, drunk on memory. The primitive ways we cope.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Miya Atsumu
Comments: 47
Kudos: 258





	swimsleep

**Author's Note:**

> this contains heavy drinking, and is a tonal departure from the rest of my works. godspeed.

It wasn’t even a single moment. There was no _click_ , in which Hajime realized what he was doing—there was only the slow, steady descent into the familiar, the sweet liquid-dark of memory. At no point did he look up and see how far he’d sunk.

  
  


***

  
  


Miya Atsumu is tall. And somewhat imposing, and indiscriminately over-friendly with everyone on the Japanese National team to the point where no one feels special enough to be uncomfortable about it. He enters the training gym each day as if they’ve already won the Olympics, serves like the world is about to fall off its axis, and stares at the ball like he wants it to be afraid of him. Hajime begrudges this mindset in its totality until he realizes it might just help them win. He is stupidly good at volleyball, and Hajime isn’t so well-behaved as to not wonder what he would have thought of him if they’d met in high school. Hajime watches from the bench, clipboard in hand, as Atsumu leaps out of bounds to launch a quick at Sakusa. It flies brilliantly, Sakusa slams it into the back corner, and after they land Atsumu begins to croon a complicated series of nicknames at him while Hoshiumi curses on the other side of the net. Sakusa looks at him like he’s from the moon.

Hajime isn’t charitable enough to think that he would have liked him.

But they’re adults, now. Hajime had met him on his first day with the team, laid eyes on the sort of smile that desperately begged you to hate it, and decided that disliking him would be too easy. He was going to try and like him instead. An inside joke with himself. A challenge. He was going to like Miya Atsumu.

Hell, Atsumu collected others’ resentment towards him like candy. Atsumu made a career out of poking the bear. Hajime would make a career out of getting poked and then telling him, _Hey, actually, a little bit to the left. Yeah, that’s the spot._

  
  


Hajime surprises himself. Within their first week, Atsumu materializes behind Hajime in the locker room, and asks him if he can call him “ _Hajime-kun_ ” in a tone of voice that announces that he’s already made his choice and whatever answer comes will be disregarded, and Hajime whips around and gives him a bright “ _Yeah, sure!_ ” in a tone of voice that announces that he is at least twenty steps ahead of that thought process.

The look on Atsumu’s face almost reaches panic, for a split second, and even after Atsumu has launched some snide recovery at him and disappeared, Hajime feels his own smile lingering.

It was about time Atsumu gave him a shitty nickname on par with _Omi-Omi_ and _Umi-Umi_ , and it was about time he took it and twisted it back at him with a grin. He is momentarily diabolical. _Atsumu: 0,_ he thinks, _Hajime-kun: 1._

  
  


Hajime gets to surprise himself again. Atsumu treats _Hajime-kun_ like an entirely different person than _Iwaizumi-san_ , and even though it’s all of week two of practice, Atsumu has given himself enough leeway to begin shoulder-checking Hajime in a way that would feel friendly from anyone else and feels mostly acidic from him, and has also given himself jurisdiction over Hajime’s pens. He slides an arm over Hajime’s shoulder at the side of the court as Hajime’s on the bench observing drills—Aran tweaked his wrist last week and Hajime refuses to take an eye off of him—and spends only a second theatrically pouring over Hajime’s notes before plucking the pen from the top of the clipboard with a _snap_.

And it’s the kind of buddy-buddy behavior Atsumu’s been launching himself into, but Hajime is still caught off-guard when he leans in and asks: “D’you need this, Hajime-kun?”

Hajime pretends to be lost in his notes for a blissful, brief moment. Atsumu’s arm is a warm weight against the back of his neck. _I’m not losing this round either._ He waits, and then he glances up. “Huh?”

Atsumu is incredibly close, clicking the pen, flicking his eyes between it and Hajime. He wears the same smile as before, the _punch-me-in-the-face_ grin, ear to blasted ear. He only just stepped off the court and has immediately begun searching for trouble, wearing the clean smell of fresh sweat. Hajime only has a moment to stare at a streak of moisture on Atsumu’s forehead before he opens his mouth again: “D’you need this pen, Hajime-kun?”

_Wow. That’s a stupid one._

Hajime watches Atsumu searching his face. The pen, really? The gleam in Atsumu’s eye tells him he knows how absurd it is. _Try me,_ it says. “Well, I mean, if you’re. . .” Hajime begins. He could give it to him, he thinks, and call that a win, or he could _keep_ it, and call that— 

And then Hajime goes still. He feels the light in his own eyes flick on. _You’re not winning this round._

“ _Actually,_ ” he begins again, and then he’s leaning forward and reaching around in his back pocket, staring blankly at the court as Bokuto slams a straight over the net. Atsumu still has his arm looped around him, apparently disarmed into silence. The ball lands, bounces away, Hinata cheers somewhere in the distance. Then Hajime finds it.

“Here,” Hajime says, sitting back up. He beams at Atsumu. “I don’t need any of these, actually. You can have all of them.” Hajime holds out a hand, in it three more pens.

Atsumu is dead silent.

 _Hajime-kun: 2,_ he thinks.

And he gets to sit back and watch as Atsumu’s expression goes through some complicated transformation. Confusion, then shock, then disdain, then, slowly, a wry sort of knowing. His eyes flick from Hajime’s hand to his face. A moment of _Oh, so you’ve got this one too, huh._

Eventually, Atsumu takes them from him, but not without letting his hand linger over Hajime’s for a moment too long. Long enough, even, that Hajime’s gaze is drawn to the warmth of him, and then pulled back up when Atsumu slips his arm off of his shoulders and abruptly stands up.

Atsumu’s head eclipses a fluorescent ceiling light as he rises and stills. His grin, shot down at Hajime from an impossible height, is haloed in white-yellow. It’s not the shit-eating grin, it’s a quieter one. One that says: _You’re on._

Only one word from Atsumu before he disappears: “ _Thanks._ ”

  
  


Inevitably, Atsumu surprises him instead.

Atsumu’s dedication to setting balls overhead that are definitely low enough to be received is like nothing Hajime has ever seen before in his life, and beyond the strange, faint prickling of admiration in his gut whenever he witnesses it, there is the professional knowledge that this will one day result in disaster. He warns him against it a couple of times, from a lofty and sort of clinical position— _Leaning back like that is going to be really bad for your knees, Atsumu—_ and is patently unsurprised when Atsumu only grins condescension at him and assures him that “ _I’ll be fine, Hajime-kun! You don’t need to worry your pretty little head about me!”_

Hajime decides not to remind him that worrying about him is what he is paid to do, because in that moment, the truth of it is actually mortifying, and somehow a loss on his side.

Instead he sits back wordlessly and watches Atsumu do it for the next week: ridiculously low overhead passes, over and over again. Hajime feels only a momentary zing of righteousness when it finally goes terribly wrong during a scrimmage, and Atsumu is suddenly on the floor. Everyone stares silently for a moment as Atsumu clutches his knee.

Then Hajime remembers that he is literally paid to worry about Miya Atsumu. _Fuck._

Atsumu needs his left knee taped. This happens minutes later, with Atsumu on the bench in the locker room and Hajime kneeling in front of him, biting back a hundred different versions of _I called it_. It would be unprofessional. But he’s smiling to himself anyways, pulling another strip of tape from the package and successfully ignoring the glowering look on Atsumu’s face. It’s not a serious injury—just a pull, nothing wrong with the joint itself, the kind of inconvenience that Hajime hopes will piss him off enough to teach him a lesson. He lets the firmness in his movements speak for themselves.

Atsumu still says nothing while Hajime is sliding a second strip of tape up his leg, and Hajime about to count this as another score ( _Atsumu: 0, Hajime-kun: 3_ ) when Atsumu opens his mouth.

“So, Hajime-kun, are you gonna say _I told you so?_ ”

Hajime glances up. Atsumu’s question was stunningly quiet. He’s still quiet, now, the look on his face somehow sober, only one eyebrow quirked. Like whatever act he usually puts on has been dropped entirely. Like the watchful look from last week, when Hajime handed him one of his pens, and something seemed to click. His eyes flick between Hajime’s face and the hands on his knee. He half-smiles.

Hajime finds himself utterly disarmed. Is this what happens to Atsumu when he gets injured? Hajime grins through the strangeness. “Well, I don’t know, ‘Tsumu, would you knock it off if I did?”

“Knock what off?”

“The goddamned overhead passes.”

“Ah,” and there’s Atsumu again, that shit-eating smirk, all of him lit back up. Hajime feels relief settle over him. “Are ‘ya worried about my health, _Hajime-chan_?”

 _Hajime-chan._ Hajime’s hands go still against Atsumu’s leg for a second. He makes them move again. He clears his throat. “Well, from a professional standpoint, given that it’s literally my job to be worried about your health, yeah, I think I am.”

“Hm,” Atsumu hums. “That’s awful kind of ‘ya. Maybe I’ll have to think about it. Try out an underhand pass one of these days.”

Hajime unsticks a third piece of tape. He clears his throat again. “Well, ‘Tsumu, I’m sure there are plenty of people on this team who would be willing to teach you how to receive, if you’re interested in learning.” _I can play this game._ “Seeing as you’re so clearly unfamiliar.”

Atsumu barks out a laugh. _There it is._ “That’s pretty bold for someone talking to an Olympic athlete, Hajime-chan.”

Hajime slides the side of his palm down Atsumu’s shin to get the tape to lay flat. He smothers a smile, forces his tone serious. “Oh, an Olympic athlete, huh, _Trashsumu_ ? You’re not going to be much of an Olympic athlete next month if you bust your knees doing stunts, and get put on medical leave before the games.” He presses into the back of Atsumu’s calf to get the end of another piece of tape to stick. _Trashsumu,_ he thinks. He can’t not smile. There’s fondness, there, blooming into something painfully warm. “And as your athletic trainer, I’m obligated to inform you that you won’t be allowed to set foot on the court with a knee injury. Kageyama would have to carry the whole game for you. Now _that_ would be a shame.”

“Tobio-chan on the court the whole game?” Atsumu pauses, and Hajime isn’t looking up at him, but he can imagine the smirk on his lips. He feels Atsumu lean back to settle his hands against the bench. His voice drops: “Nah, I’m sure I’ll be just fine, with an athletic trainer like _Hajime-chan_ to take care of me.” Then, suddenly, he flexes his calf beneath Hajime’s grip.

Hajime presses against the swooping in his stomach, but his head jerks up automatically. Atsumu’s there, leaning back, smiling down at him, eyes flicking between Hajime’s face and the place where his hand is wrapped around his leg. Miya Atsumu is tall. And somewhat imposing. And he’s got a smile that begs you to hate it. He’s got a smile that begs you to— 

“ _Well_ ,” Hajime begins, cutting off his own thought. He’s somewhere far off, suddenly unsteady, the skin on the back of his neck beginning to sting with heat. He is distantly aware that his face is red. Atsumu’s eyes are a physical weight against his skin. His voice is odd and scratched-up: “Your athletic trainer can only really do his job if you listen to him, ‘Tsumu.”  
“Oh yeah?” Hajime can hear his grin. His calf is still flexed, layer upon layer of intricate muscle, a decade’s backlog of drills, leaps, serves. “Well, I’m listening.”

Hajime glances up, helpless. Atsumu’s got a smile that tells you he knows he’s handsome. Hajime is not going to hate Miya Atsumu. Nor is he going to— 

“Uh-huh,” Hajime says, teeth gritted against the hot buzzing beneath his skin. He notes absently that he, too, is smiling. “And as your athletic trainer, _Trashsumu,_ I’m telling you to take it easy on these knees.” He’s smoothing the final piece of tape down over and over again, hoping the motion might mask the trembling in his fingers. He needs to stop smiling. _It would be unprofessional, you ass._ He needs to wipe the smile off of his face. _It would be unprofessional._ “Unless you want to sit here and have me tape them every week.”

A pause, and then Atsumu’s voice comes at a low purr: “Actually, I think I could get used to this, _Iwa-chan._ ”

And time stops. 

_Iwa-chan._

Hajime goes perfectly still. All the heat beneath his skin drops away at once. 

It’s one of those things that’s so stupid, in retrospect. The kind of realization that clubs you over the head, so obvious after the fact that it becomes a parody of itself. All the things that he’d been doing the whole time, leaning into, letting slip. It had been _so_ easy not to hate Miya Atsumu. It had been altogether too easy.

Something like shame, or dread, strikes low and hard in Hajime’s stomach. Each piece of it washes over him, one by one: He’d let him call him _Hajime-kun. Hajime-chan._ He was calling him _Trashsumu_ , bickering with him, stuffing down smiles, pretend-annoyance, kneeling in front of him, taping his _knee—_

_Iwa-chan._

He gets a moment, then, where reality slips, and the vision of his hands on Atsumu’s knee lurches, spills into the memory of something else. A bench in a different locker room. A set of legs just as sturdy, muscle as hard-won, but a pair of hands less practiced. Fingers, pressing around the swollen stain of a bruise. _Hold still, Shittykawa._ He wasn’t taping it, then, they were just biding their time and waiting for their coach, Hajime touching the wound gently, Tooru pouting down at him from a hundred different angles, the teal-white fabric of his shorts pulling against the metal as he leaned back to groan— _It’s not even that bad, Iwa-chan, you’re not my mom, I can’t even feel it—_ and Hajime looking up at Tooru, feeling the grin as it was pulled from him. Tooru looking down, meeting his gaze, and scowling, and trying _so_ hard to look like he was mad, trying _so_ hard to look like he wasn’t enjoying it, that both of them could only hold it together for a single second until they both broke at once, and their laughter rushed—and Tooru’s hands were on his shoulders—in his hair— 

“Iwaizumi?”

And the sound of his name, bare, is enough to seize him from it.

Hajime looks up from the bench in the other locker room, up into this one, and in this one he finds Miya Atsumu staring down at him. His features are twisted in concern, dark eyebrows pinched, smile wiped away. His face is crystalline worry. He is terrifyingly sober. How long had Hajime crouched there, silent?

“Iwaizumi-san?”

Hajime’s hands are numb where they touch Atsumu’s skin. He yanks them back, reels, and stops himself just before he’s about to get to his feet and move away. “I—” he begins, but the words catch in his throat. He’s still staring at Atsumu’s legs, the red-black-white shorts, the dark scores of tape stretched over his skin. It’s all the wrong color. For several seconds he doesn’t move. This bench, and that, those legs, and— 

_Get it together, Hajime._

“I— Sorry.” Hajime reaches for the package of tape that he’s left on the floor, and the clipboard, and the pen, and anything else he can get his hands on, and begins gathering them up in his arms. He has to force words out through a voice that doesn’t sound like his. “I’m all good. Your knee’s good. I’m done—” He clears his throat. There’s panic there, blocking his words. “I’m done taping. You’ll be fine. You’re good to go.”

And when he risks a look up at Atsumu, he’s not ready for the expression on his face. Horror, innocent, like a child caught at something wrong. A dozen different words are trying to come out of Atsumu at once, and Hajime doesn’t want to imagine what they are— _Are you okay, did I do something wrong, did I make you uncomfortable, I’m sorry—_ and Hajime deflates, a limp marionette of relief, when Atsumu simply swallows and nods and vanishes from the bench and doesn’t make Hajime listen to him say something as harrowing or cruel as _I’m sorry._ Hajime wouldn’t know where to begin.

Hajime simply stares at the spot on the bench where Atsumu just sat, and listens to the granular rush of blood in his ears. When the name comes again— _Iwa-chan_ —like siren-song, he pushes against it.

_Iwa-chan._

The empty locker room, and the squeak of a roll of tape crushed in his fist.

  
  


*

  
  


“He does that to everyone, you know.” 

“Huh?” Hajime starts, jerks his head up. He’s brooding in his office, body pressed into a desk chair, pen in his hand, papers in front of him inexplicably unreadable. He’d left the locker room only five minutes ago, Atsumu’s fingerprints still on him like brands. Panic still high in his throat. He swivels and stops.

Yaku is in the doorway. He wears his jersey over a pair of sweatpants, and his bag of gear dangles at his side. They got out of practice moments ago. “Atsumu, I mean. Does it to everyone.” His tone is forced-casual.

Hajime has to close his mouth, so he doesn’t gawk. He doesn’t know when Yaku showed up or how much he saw, but now that he’s here his presence is the whole room, his eyes on Hajime like watchful beacons. He’s conspicuously quiet. Hajime can imagine what he’s finding, as he searches Hajime’s face. Sudden red-flush, all the way from his cheeks to his neck. All of it stings. 

Hajime says nothing for a very long time. He hadn’t realized Yaku overheard. He wonders what he—He wonders what it must have looked like, to someone watching from the outside. Atsumu, talking to him like that, touching him, and Hajime unable to move afterwards. What that must have looked like.

 _Iwa-chan._ It rings like a bell tower.

“Did you—” Hajime says. The words stick in his mouth, clumsy. _What did you see._ “What did you. . .”

“No, I just overheard. From the room over.“ Yaku clears his throat. He’s nervous, Hajime realizes, rendered stiff by what he thinks he just saw. Awkward on Hajime’s behalf. “I can get him to stop, you know, if it’s making you—”

“ _No._ ” Hajime blurts it out too quickly, and then starts at the sound of his own voice. He can only imagine what he looks like, lips parted, eyes blown wide. “No, I mean, it’s fine.” The recovery is feeble. “It’s not like that at all. He’s not—I’m not uncomfortable. You don’t have to say anything to Atsumu. Don’t say anything. We’re just like that.”

Yaku’s eyes, glassy with something inaccessible, search his face. Hajime watches as he almost-starts a series of different sentences. “I mean—Alright.” 

And Hajime stares, and can come up with nothing to say, and eventually Yaku seems to realize this, and in the next moment he nods stiffly and is gone. Hajime stares at the blankness of the wall where he just stood, and tries to bring himself back down to earth.  
  


***

  
  


Hinata’s birthday party is late-June, barely a month before the games, the last chance any of them will have to get ambitiously drunk before practice eclipses every other priority entirely. It’s at Bokuto and Akaashi’s place in Tokyo, the nicest of any of theirs. The ceilings are bright and high and sprawling, and the whole team and all of Hinata’s friends are already clustered in the living room when Hajime arrives an hour late. A part of him had still clutched at the thought of bailing entirely, the entire subway ride over, staring at the other people in the train cabin and wondering at the hundred other places they were going that were not this party. What was the use, anyways, of getting drunk, when the games loomed on the horizon? What was the point of complicating things, when he had work to do, and when he might run into— 

Bokuto’s pressing a drink into his hand before he even leaves the foyer. Hajime stares at it in the dim and thinks: _Hell, it’s Hinata’s birthday._ He has to lean in to hear over the music as Bokuto’s explains what the beverage is, and then he fixes his gaze on a point on the rainbow-strobe ceiling and downs it in one go.

_Hell._

But he’s already here, he thinks, no going back—the mass of bodies is already swirling around him as Bokuto tugs him out of the foyer, people are clinking glasses together, Hinata’s clearly got a million friends in the area, faces he half-knows smiling at him, and at the far end of the room Akaashi’s monopolizing the sound system to play an old Kaoru Akimono record, and, well, it’s a party. Hajime will find a way.

He lets Bokuto lead him through the living room into the kitchen, chattering on about the plans he and Hoshiumi have for the sake he brought; Hajime hears none of it. He ducks into the kitchen, positions himself against the fridge, leans against it. He casts his gaze over the kitchen island, into the living room.

When he searches the crowd long enough, Atsumu is there. And when Atsumu looks up and stares at him, Hajime stares back.

  
  


*

  
  


It’d been a week. Atsumu hadn’t talked to him, hadn’t touched him, since the moment in the locker room.

There’d been a part of Hajime that was impressed, beneath the brittle layers of unease. Caution looked foreign on Miya Atsumu, but he was meticulous about it, and built it up around himself like armor, drew discretion in perfectly, like the silence in his fist before he served. His ability to be excruciatingly polite placed everything else about him in starling contrast. Atsumu leaning against the wall of the gymnasium, making faces at Sakusa, smiling mock-lascivious at Yaku, flirting at Hinata from a hundred different angles—all of that now vanished entirely when Hajime appeared. It revealed itself as a front. That cat-smile was replaced, every time Hajime looked at him, by a quiet, polite watchfulness. A simple nod, an _I’m not going to bother you,_ an, _I’m not going to do that to you again,_ an, _I know boundaries._ An, _I’m sorry._

Miya Atsumu was a switch that could turn off.

It made Hajime burn.

Each time, there were a dozen different things Hajime wanted to say to him. A volcanic surge of words. _Don’t apologize. It wasn’t actually about you. It’s probably about someone else._ Hajime would stare at Atsumu’s back as he stood on the court, watch the number on his practice bib ripple as he jumped, come up with new opening sentences. _You didn’t actually make me uncomfortable, that time in the locker room. I want you to know that. I actually didn’t mind. I actually didn’t mind at all. I only freaked out, ‘cause—_

Hajime, whiteknuckling the edge of his clipboard, staring across the court. Atsumu, launching a perfect toss to Hinata, landing, lilting praise at him when it hits. His laughter pealing, his head, his stupid hair tipped back. The dignified set of his shoulders, the scores of tape around his knee.

_I only freaked out because you remind me of this other guy._

  
  


And maybe it was better, Hajime had decided eventually, that Atsumu pulled the plug, determined that Hajime couldn’t handle whatever game they’d been playing. Because he was right, Hajime thought, on the third day after the incident. He was right. When Hajime was ducking out of his office and heard Atsumu’s voice ringing down the hall— _Shou-chan!_ —he felt it again, his gut dropping out, because there was a moment where reality slipped. He shut his eyes and leaned heavily against his door, and for that split second he was transported: A different hallway, a different voice, a different name, but the same— the same tone. The same curl up at the end of the word, the way his voice hung in the air. The same laughter. The way Oikawa would call _Iwa-chan,_ and it would ring through a gymnasium, over a court, down a hallway, across a bedroom. Light pitched through space-time. The way it would announce Oikawa coming to him. He’d hear, _Iwa-chan,_ and Oikawa was always about to be there, a hand, promised to his skin, a hand about to shove at his shoulder, a hand about to card through his hair— 

The moment in the hallway, leaning against the door as he heard Atsumu’s voice, wasn’t the first time. It was every moment on the court. Atsumu’s tosses were like Oikawa’s. His laughter was like Oikawa’s. His teammates looked at him the way they looked at Oikawa. Once Hajime saw it he couldn't set the thought down, and it became a broken bone that he couldn’t snap back into place. A limb forever dislocated, his years of education useless. He stood beside the court, numb and stupid and immovable, and watched over and over again as Atsumu launched balls parallel to the net, and he flinched at the sight of his wrists flashing. He flinched at the way his feet hit the ground. He flinched at the sound of his laughter. He flinched at the way Hinata smacked him square between the shoulder blades, and beamed adoration at him.

Because if he squinted, it was— it was close enough.

Eventually, Atsumu’s knee needed to be checked again, and re-taped, but he went to the assistant trainer for it. Hajime had only found out the next day, when Atsumu came in with red tape up his leg instead of black. He’d passed Hajime in one of the gym’s doorways, and given him that same nod—the blanched, polite _I’m sorry_ nod, the one that made Hajime’s skin singe—and pretended not to notice when Hajime stared at his leg.

Hajime almost broke, then, almost blurted something out. _It’s not your fault. You just remind me of—_

But Atsumu was already turning, walking away, never having stopped. Hajime watched his back, his shoulders, the bag swinging at his side. The tape wrapped around his knee. He knew he wouldn’t have been able to say it, anyways.

  
  


*

  
  


Hajime is almost glad he came to the party. It’s not even an hour in, but Bokuto’s behind the kitchen-bar with Hoshiumi and together they’re like a swarm of bees, constant and buzzing, mixing things, collecting empty glasses, shouting across the apartment, pressing new mysteries into Hajime’s hand, laughing things at him that he doesn’t really hear. Hajime hovers in space between the kitchen and the living room with his shoulder pressed into the wall and drinks whatever they’re giving him; his hand hasn’t been left empty for even a minute. People he sort-of knows pass him and smile, and when they do he finds himself smiling too, and replying to what they say, even if in the next instant he forgets what it was. His head is a single thudding. So is the apartment. He leans into it, decides he wants to make the thudding louder, until it’s whole enough to drown out his thoughts entirely. Bokuto and Hoshiumi are clinking things together behind him, the living room has turned into a dim likeness of a dance floor, Akaashi’s Akimono record has been switched out for something pulsing and juvenile. Hinata knows how to throw a party. Olympians know how to drink.

And Hajime can’t bring himself to care that he looks odd, standing motionless against the wall, only half-chatting to Bokuto; he’s foggy and drunk enough for any worry to slide right off of him. He really only wants one thing. He knows that he only wants one thing. He knew, on the subway ride here, even, that as soon as he entered the party and got a drink in his hand he was going to want only one thing—he now stands against the wall with a glass in his fist, positioned squarely in the middle of that desire. He could laugh.

And that one thing is staring back at him. The volcanic surge of words takes on a life of its own, again, every time Atsumu’s head turns to look at him between sets of shoulders in the crowd. Hajime feels himself lift away from the wall a little each time he meets his eyes, like the words are ready, like they’re a physical force: _Hey, about that time in the locker room. You didn’t actually make me uncomfortable._ He doesn’t know how many times they’ve glanced. Atsumu keeps doing it. It’s become a game of its own. Atsumu, chatting away with someone else, looking up at him every minute. Every half-minute. And maybe Atsumu sees him leaning against the wall, unmoving, and unlike everyone else in the room, knows what it means. _Come over here._

On Hajime’s fifth drink, Atsumu suddenly slips away from the crowd. When Hajime sees it, he feels his own fist tighten around the glass, feels his own arm move to set it down on the counter beside him. It’s that motion that tells him just how drunk he is; it sends him off balance, the whole world swirls for a moment, and then he’s steady again. He looks up and Atsumu’s reappeared at the back of the room, chatting with the blonde who’s at the sound system, and then he’s—

And then he’s turned around, and is pitching his gaze across the room at Hajime, a light-beacon through the dim. A look oversharp, overfull with intent. He holds it for several seconds, or several minutes, and then he lets go, and it drops like a weight loosed. Atsumu immediately heads for the stairs. 

Hajime isn’t too drunk not to know what it means. What the glance means, and the purposeful steps, the head jerked towards the stairwell. _Come over here._

Hajime has no reason to believe it’ll help. He has no reason to believe it’ll make him feel better. He follows anyways.

  
  


*

The last time Hajime had talked to Oikawa Tooru was months ago, over the phone.

Oikawa’s voice, washed-out and thin though the phone’s speakers: _Hey, Iwaizumi, do you have Mizoguchi’s contact? I’m trying to get a hold of him._

Hajime stilled himself against the railing. He’d stumbled out the back door of the condo, out onto the balcony, clutching at air, gasping at it, the moment he saw the caller ID. Tokyo dropped out beneath the terrace. His friends continued making noise in the kitchen behind him.

_Do you have Mizoguchi’s contact?_

Their old assistant coach. Some benign errand Oikawa needed to take care of. Hajime’s gut dropped out.

He didn’t know what he’d expected.

Hajime stared, while words struggled into shape. It was strange, he thought suddenly, the way events like this took place while the rest of the world carried on. Down six floors of high-rise, the traffic below became cruel in its ignorance. There were people in their cars, occupied with the bumper in front of them, listening to music, headed elsewhere, perfectly unaware of what was taking place on the balcony over their heads. Hajime clutched the railing. It was a strangely hateful feeling, having private knowledge of one of the world’s small brutalities, faced with others who did not. Hajime stared hatred down at the cars’ roofs. 

_Uh, yeah,_ he said finally. The words, the voice, did not feel like his own. _I think I have his number. I can text it to you._

_Thanks! Just wanted to get in touch with him before the Games._

_Right._

Oikawa let the line sit in silence for several seconds. Hajime was a statue of himself, an aching crystallized, unable to form words. Maybe there was something he was supposed to say. He stared down at his fist, curled around the ice-iron of the bannister. He couldn’t think of it.

Eventually, Oikawa acted cold mercy: _I gotta go now, sorry. Bye-bye!_

And the line went dead.

An earlier version of Hajime would have been brim-full with regret, with panic, convinced that he just let something slip. That Oikawa had expected something that he didn’t deliver. That maybe there had been something he could have said in that moment to keep the conversation going, some magic phrase that would have torn down the years-barrier and kept them out on their balconies, talking into their phones for hours.

This version of Hajime knew there wasn’t.

There had been the long-distance thing they’d always said they were going to make work, and then there had been the collapse of it, the sea slowly cracking itself open against a breaker. Oikawa’s trip to Irvine that fell through. Hajime’s trip to Argentina that he let fall through because at that point they’d already begun to drift and he couldn’t bring himself to face the sight of Oikawa’s life, whole and full without him. There had been a point in time where they both tried to hold it together, phone calls not unlike this one, conversations that grew more stilted in perfect cadence with the number of months they had spent apart. Hajime got to know regret over again a hundred times, those months. He got to know disappointment, every angle of it, every whetted edge. It was clear what was going to happen well before it happened; he’d spent countless silent moments wondering how much longer they were going to let it go, before one of them dropped the knife and let the rope split.

They had let it go three months ago, but by then the wound had already festered, and they were both overripe with grief. Both shielding private reservoirs of resentment towards the other. _Why didn’t you break up with me back in August, then, if you knew it was over?_ Hajime had said things into that phone that he knew he would regret forever. He didn’t care then. He didn’t know if he cared now.

They hadn’t talked since then. Oikawa hadn’t called since then. It had been three months of radio silence. And he called now, just to— 

Just to ask for their old assistant coach’s contact information.

It was the kind of thing that an earlier version of Hajime would have been angry about. He would have spat at it, called it unfair, shitty, petty, _manipulative_ , any of the dozen barbs he used to use against Oikawa when it was at its worst between them. The question was obvious this time, pressed against the back of his teeth. _Why didn’t you just text me about it? For something as small as that, really? Did you really have to call? Why did you have to call?_

_Why did you make me listen to your voice?_

And there was still resentment there. Hajime felt it when he whipped around to go back inside, and was stopped in his tracks by a caustic lurching in his gut, like his own body wouldn’t let him go yet. Wanted him not to go inside and join his friends, but to turn back around and grab the railing again, and stare hatred down into traffic and steep in that resentment until it became noxious, play Oikawa’s words in his head over and over again until the meaning was bleached from them.

Hajime did it, he turned back around to stare down into traffic, grabbed the railing, watched the red-white streaks of cars’ brake lights until they blurred, became smudges of themselves pitched through the dim. _I gotta go now, sorry, bye-bye!_ What a stupid way to end a phone call. After three months. What a stupid fucking thing to say. _I gotta go now._ His eyes stung. _I gotta go now._

There was resentment there. But it was resentment that began to look at lot more like pain. Softer, frayed at the edges. Disorganized. Resentment that was hot in the middle, like longing. 

Hajime stared at the railing; the sight of it swam wet. Like missing someone.

  
  
  


*

  
  


The second floor of Bokuto’s apartment is the kind of place that is already small but feels much smaller as soon as there is another person in it, and Hajime is very drunk, and Atsumu is that other person. They’re in a poorly-lit doorway of some kind, a half-stairwell; Hajime had barely made it up the stairs, he’d taken two steps forward after the top step and suddenly Atsumu was there, chest and arms, the shape of him impossibly dim and impossibly large and impossibly close.

Miya Atsumu is tall, Hajime thinks dumbly. He has to lift up his chin to look at him, and when he does, those eyes are there, bright with something. With worry? Intent? Hajime is too bleary to tell. And too dizzy, because the motion of looking up just sent him off balance, and Atsumu’s hands are— 

“Atsumu,” Hajime says, because Atsumu’s hands are on his shoulders, warm, holding him steady.

Atsumu’s voice comes to him at a great distance: “Are you good?”

Hajime has to blink to see him again. Atsumu’s wearing that look of worry, the one with the pinched eyebrows, the kind eyes. And then of the searing comes back, and finds its place beneath Hajime’s skin again. He _hates_ it when Atsumu is polite. His drunkenness lends him a sudden and forceful clarity: He _hates_ that Atsumu is being polite, even when they’re up here, even when Hajime just followed him so they could be _alone_ . He _hates_ it when Atsumu gives him that look, that _I’m sorry_ look, he _hates_ it when Atsumu nods deference at him, he _hates_ it when he’s startlingly kind, won’t meet his gaze, acts like he did something wrong— 

“‘Tsumu,” Hajime begins, and there’s the volcanic surge of words. “You didn’t—” he stumbles, starts again. The volcanic surge of words is now. “You didn’t make me uncomfortable, in the locker room.” It’s like ripping off a bandage, a thick pad of tape. He’s distantly aware of how sudden, how awkward it sounds, and does not care. “I want you to know that. You didn’t make me uncomfortable. I didn’t— I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all.”

Atsumu is very still for a very long moment. His eyes drift in and out of clarity in Hajime’s sight; when Atsumu steps back, and slides his hands off of Hajime’s shoulders, they’re clear again. Atsumu backs up only a pace, until his back is pressed against the wall, and he’s staring down at Hajime with his lips just parted. The grainy dim hovers all around them; the music downstairs thuds, dulled.

Miya Atsumu is tall. And somewhat imposing. And stunningly handsome. Hajime lets himself look at him, now, fully; he is too drunk not to, and they’re upstairs, and they’re alone, and Hajime’s skin is on fire, and he’s just told him that he wasn’t uncomfortable in the locker room, actually, it was pretty great, actually, and staring at Atsumu’s face in the quiet half-light of the stairwell is like meeting him again for the first time. He’s wearing a stupid button-down that’s half-unbuttoned, loose over the firm lines of his chest— _an Olympic athlete—_ in a shade of baby blue that’s cast gray in the dark. His hair swoops low over his forehead, perfectly mussed, and his brows are just-pinched, and there’s a single stroke of light from the hall that lands on his jaw and goes cheek, eyelashes, browbone, forehead— 

“Hajime-kun.”

And there he is again. That voice. _Hajime-kun._ Hajime’s gut swoops.

“D’you mean it?” Atsumu asks.

And it comes crashing back again, an electric force, the fact of their being here, the fact of their aloneness in this narrow space. He followed him here. They’re drunk at a party, alone. The agreement is unspoken and immovable. The question is simple. _Yes or no._ Hajime feels every inch of his skin where it is pressed up against the wall. _You didn’t make me uncomfortable in the locker room. I actually kind of liked it. I actually liked it a lot. I really, really liked it. You are stunning. You are so tall. You remind me of—_

Hajime knows what awaits him, if he says yes. If he says, _I mean it._ He’s not too far gone to recognise the gleam in Atsumu’s eyes, the light returned to his gaze, to picture the hands reaching for his jaw, his chest. He keeps his eyes pinned below Atsumu’s neck, studying the anonymous expanse of his torso. A set of collarbones poking out beneath a baby-blue shirt collar. Shoulders, banded with muscle, skin branded gold by the sun. Setter’s arms.

He’s spent the whole week pushing against it. What he’s doing when he looks at Atsumu. What his eyes do with the image of him, the _close-enough_ , the memory of someone else so easily painted onto something living. He fixes his gaze on Atsumu’s chest, lets his vision blur. He’s tall. Lean. Handsome. It’s near-perfect.

And maybe it won’t make him feel better. Maybe there’s nothing he can do to bring him back. But Hajime doesn’t care. He drank himself here deliberately. He wants it anyways.  
“Yeah,” Hajime says. “I mean it.”

It’s Atsumu who moves, in the dark. He is so gentle at first that Hajime registers what’s going on at a seconds-delay, after Atsumu’s already stepped forward and become the only thing Hajime can see. There’s the initial rush of Atsumu’s hands against his shoulders, and then his palms, his fingers are at Hajime’s jaw, fingertips tilting his head back, and— 

His mouth is a warm sweetness, the most vivid thing Hajime’s ever felt. Hajime’s first dumbstruck thought is that he’s forgotten what it’s like, to kiss someone; the haze of drunkenness splinters open for a moment and all at once he _feels_ it, every point of contact between Atsumu’s body and his, every wet slip of Atsumu’s lips against his own, every movement of his tongue, heat given form. The deafening, crashing memory of what closeness feels like. Something thick rises in Hajime’s throat. _You remind me of—_

His back is still against the wall and Atsumu is over him, around him, leaning into him with concentration so consuming that Hajime becomes hot static beneath his hands. Atsumu’s thigh is already pressed between his legs— _Olympic athlete,_ Hajime thinks, stupid—and Hajime’s hands have already found their way into Atsumu’s hair, and the feeling of him eclipses the room, the world, envelops every other lingering mote of Hajime’s consciousness until the heat of Atsumu’s mouth against his own is the only thing that exists. Hajime can’t remember the last time the pressure of someone’s body made him feel this _alive_ , this heady, this— 

No, Hajime _can._ Hajime goes still. He _can_ remember.

Hajime leans forward into Atsumu, pulls his fingers through his hair. Blood-buzzes when that earns him a whimper. _Oh, that’s close._

Hajime _can_ remember the last time, and he _does._

_Wants to._

“Hajime-chan,” Atsumu gasps, when Hajime suddenly lifts himself away from the wall. And oh, _that’s close too,_ Hajime thinks, suddenly that’s so close, and so is the way Atsumu is backing up, now, letting Hajime push him into the opposite wall, press his thigh between his legs, lean _up_ until Atsumu’s breath hitches _,_ the softest, sweetest sound. _That’s so close._ A sound that could belong to someone else. A sound that could belong to a memory. Hajime’s gut is a pit for something heady and roiling. He closes his eyes, leans in, chases down that shimmer of him, stares at the black of his eyelids as he catches his lips against the soft swell of Atsumu’s throat—Atsumu keens, whimpers, huffs gently when Hajime presses in further, drags his tongue against his skin. _Yeah,_ _that’s—_ His fists are bundled in the shirt; baby-blue button-down, unbuttoned to his sternum, anyone’s shirt. Anyone’s voice. Anyone’s chest beneath his hands. He can be whoever Hajime wants. _That’s close enough._

Hajime doesn’t know what he’s doing until he is doing it, and by that point it’s already too late. It’s Oikawa beneath him. The shame hits at a delay, the single imprecise thought of _What are you doing—_ and is immediately smothered by the sight of him. The sudden sight of— Oikawa, pressed against the wall, shirt half-open to the dim, chest sweat-slick and heaving. If Hajime keeps his eyes lowered, pinned beneath his jaw, to the parts of his body that are nondescript, anonymous, it’s— it’s him. It’s Oikawa. He is drunk enough not to second-guess it. He is drunk enough to be shocked by it, even. To feel something hot and thick rising in his throat. Hajime can hear his own ragged breaths. He’s looking at Oikawa. He is looking at _Oikawa._

He never thought he’d see him again.

The tide of emotion is forceful enough that Hajime has to run from it, and has nowhere to go but forwards, back into the breach, back into the blind, gasping memory of him. He lurches, and there are hands around him, _Oikawa’s_ hands, hands at his jaw, at his waist, their pressure against his skin a miracle beyond Hajime’s grasp, there are lips against his cheek, his jaw, kissing down his throat, and in that moment they’re _Oikawa’s_ lips, and Hajime’s eyes are screwed shut tight enough that the backs of his eyelids kaleidoscope. It is Oikawa beneath him and he has never felt anything sweeter in his life. It is Oikawa beneath him and he has never experienced a miracle until this moment. It has been _so long_ . He is a singular buzzing, he could _melt,_ into this— 

And then, his voice. “Hajime-chan. . .” A hitch, where Hajime presses against him, suddenly disarmed. And then, quieter, oblivious:

“Iwa-chan—” 

For a moment, Hajime’s world goes still. He becomes a statute beneath Oikawa’s hands, one thigh pressed up between his legs. His eyes are shut and the whole world is dark. His head tips forward; he lets it fall, until it meets Oikawa’s chest. He breathes out, feels his breath ruffle the fabric of his shirt. Oikawa’s shirt. The music from downstairs thuds through the walls.

He needs several seconds to muster the words. When they come, he shocks himself with his own force: “Say that again.”

“What?”

Hajime balls his fists in Oikawa’s shirt. He begins to tug at it, to lift it from where it’s half-tucked into his pants. He’s still in pitch-dark, blinded by his own shut eyes. He presses his thigh _up_ again, listens to the soft catch of breath in the back of Oikawa’s throat. “Iwa-chan,” Hajime says. “Call me that again.”

There’s a stunned silence, but Hajime does not care, is drunk enough to not care, has already begun tugging at the waistband of Oikawa’s pants, grabbing at the zipper. He’s this far. They’ve gone this far. 

Finally it comes, again, his voice—” _Iwa-chan.”_

And for a split second the world is complete.

Hajime loses his grip, at some point in it. _Iwa-chan._ One minute he’s at the wall, keening, pressing Oikawa up against it, listening to his name— _Iwa-chan—_ spun through the air over and over again, until it’s just a saccharine wash of noise, and Hajime gets to float, drown in its buoyancy. The next minute Oikawa is tugging at his shoulders, pushing him through a doorway, the quiet hiss of a door swinging open, swinging shut. Hajime is stumbling blind-drunk behind him. He doesn’t know how long they’ve been here. He doesn’t know how long it takes them to get to the bed, but then they’re on it, and he can see nothing, and Oikawa is beneath him and his mouth is on his, wet and sweet and dark and whole. _Iwa-chan_ , mumbled against his lips.

  
  


The last time he touched Oikawa, they were young men, still shedding the final flush of their adolescence. Oikawa was sprawled out beneath him on a bed that was neither of theirs, washed white-gold in lamplight, his limbs against the sheets like heat given form. His eyes flashed, smiled, held Hajime where he was. Music thudded downstairs as they moved. The moment was stolen, as little theirs as the room, or the apartment, or the hours themselves. It was sweetened, sharpened by that knowledge. Kisses like one fire poured into another. Oikawa’s hips coming down against his own like heat, like mercy.

And Hajime remembers feeling stupid—it was the dozenth, or hundredth time that he had _seen_ Oikawa, with his legs parted, his head tipped back, every sweat-streaked inch of his throat. Sounds drawn from him like music. It was the hundredth time. But Hajime remembers being afraid to touch him with his hands, that time. Like he was a mirage, and a hand extended and pressed against the bareness of his chest would pass right through him, and he would fizzle and dissolve into the mattress. He could not be real—the smooth expanse of his skin, the muscles in his arms vanishing and reappearing as he shifted, gasped, pressed himself up into Hajime, _onto_ Hajime, his eyes like light-beacons.

And then Oikawa took his arm, his hand, and Hajime remembers watching in terror as Oikawa slowly brought it down to his own chest, his clavicle, his throat. Hajime, gripped with the fear that he wasn’t real, his hand would slip through him, pass like sand, like time— 

“Oikawa—” he’d choked, but the hand was met with the solidity of him. His hand was met with the warmth of his skin, and Oikawa’s laughter.

  
  


“Oikawa—” Hajime chokes. 

This time the hand is met with nothing. Hajime’s reaching out through the blind-dark, through the blackness of his eyelids, out of that lifetime, into this one, and his hand is met with— 

“What?”

Hajime goes perfectly still. He feels a breath as it exits him. “ _Oikawa,”_ he says— 

He opens his eyes, and it’s Atsumu.

All the heat beneath Hajime’s skin drops away at once. Cold, clawing up from the pit of his stomach, rises to replace it.

Hajime’s vision slowly comes into focus; Atsumu is frozen beneath him. His expression is horror crystallized. The image of him is at once obscene, absurd, sprawled out on a bed beneath Hajime in the dark, in a bedroom not theirs, an apartment not theirs, their belts undone, their jeans pulled down, Hajime’s hand— 

“What, dude?” Atsumu’s voice is torn.

There is music downstairs but the room is a vacuum. Soundless space. There is no air in the room.

The worst part is Atsumu’s blank innocence, Hajime realizes. The worst part is that Hajime dragged Atsumu into this. The worst part is that Hajime just gasped another man’s name and opened his eyes in the dim and been presented with Miya Atsumu, and felt a cosmic disappointment. Miya Atsumu, who is stunningly handsome, who is tall, who is warm in Hajime’s grasp, whose mouth is open— 

“ _What did you just say_?”

Something in Hajime comes loose. It was on a precarious perch to begin with, he’s distantly aware; it careens down, now, at the sight of Atsumu’s expression, and it tears other things loose with it, gathers speed, a meteor-cluster of regret. Hajime feels the force of the crash-landing before it hits. He brought Atsumu in here, he followed him upstairs, he shut his eyes, he kissed him, pressed him to a wall, he said, _Call me Iwa-chan,_ he thought of him as _Oikawa,_ as _Oikawa, as Oikawa—_

And Hajime breaks. He splinters.

Hajime does not have it in him to feel embarrassed, when the pricking begins behind his eyes. Maybe he’s too drunk, maybe he’s simply too far gone, maybe he’s too thickly-bandaged in the years-old _want_ to feel anything else. When the tears come in their full flush, he does not stop them; could not, if he tried. His awareness is just clear enough for him to wonder briefly what he must look like, from Atsumu’s perspective, bent over him in the dim, face crumpling, silent, a hand still curled where their bare hips meet. But he has so little time to wonder, because in the next second Atsumu’s hands are at his own, pulling his arms up, steadying him, pressing against his jaw to tilt up his head.

“Iwaizumi?” Atsumu is searching his face. The accusation is gone; his eyes are bright with worry.

Hajime is drunk, and at the sound of his name the truth lurches, spills out of him, disorganized and runny. It is a truth too large for him alone; he cannot hold it. “I _miss him_.”

Atsumu’s face softens only further. “What?”

Hajime has to croak the word out: “ _Oikawa._ ”

Oh, _God,_ he misses him. To speak it out loud knocks down some barrier, and his absence is suddenly a rushing noise, a force in itself, terrifyingly loud. His absence is everywhere. His absences occupies every corner of this room. His absence occupies years of Hajime’s life. His absence occupies the space beneath Hajime, the warm, thrumming body not his. His absence— 

“Oh, God, Iwaizumi,” Atsumu says, but that’s not accusation. In the next second Atsumu’s hands are a warmth at Hajime’s chest, pushing him upright, tugging at his own jeans, tugging at Hajime’s, making quick, unsteady work of their belts. Hajime kneels there, numb, straddling him, and lets himself be put back together. He feels like a child. He wipes his face, his hand comes away wet, and he feels like a child. He wonders distantly if he should feel embarrassed; he only aches, and there is no room for embarrassment alongside that ache. Atsumu’s forehead brushes his chest as he closes Hajime’s belt. The ache keens.

Atsumu leans back again, eventually, and makes no move to push Hajime off of him. The mattress dips beneath him and he is haloed in the comforter. He only stares, bright-eyed, lips just parted. Hajime watches him through his tears, useless, drunk. “Here,” Atsumu says finally, and he extends a hand.

Hajime doesn’t know what it means, but he reaches for it, and after the next moment of drunken vertigo his head is on Atsumu’s chest. The rest of him is on him, too, and Atsumu’s hands are in his hair, and Hajime does not have space to think of what this is; he is immeasurably, cosmically tired. His tiredness is larger than him. His feelings are so broad, so worn-out that they feel hollow within him, like rotten tree-stems, when he pushes against them they ring like caverns. They are beyond-massive, like numbers too large for the human brain to process, which fade instead into a blank sort of vastness. Hajime is too tired to wonder, right now, at that vastness. Just how high those hollow tree-stems go. Atsumu is warm; his shirt is getting wet where Hajime’s face rests against it. 

“Should I . . .” And God, Atsumu’s voice is a terror. It’s so pillowy-soft, so gentle, little more than a whisper against the crown of Hajime’s head. Atsumu is terrifyingly gentle. He is so _kind_. “Should I call you Iwa-chan?”

“ _No._ ” Iwaizumi rushes it out immediately. _Iwa-chan_. And there it is, that hot kick of shame, but it’s weak, and immediately soothed by the feeling of Atsumu’s hand in his hair. It begins to move, in small circles, slowly, gentle fingertips against his scalp.

“Okay,” Atsumu says. “That’s okay. I won't, then.” And there’s that sweet voice. Something about it draws up another well of tears in Hajime, the sheer absurdity of Atsumu’s kindness, of his forgiveness, how whole it is, the warmth of Atsumu’s arms around him; Atsumu makes no move to push him away when the wet spots on his shirt grow wider. 

“You don’t have to—”

“Shh,” Atsumu whispers. He smooths a hand down the back of Hajime’s head, down his neck, draws soft circles against his skin. He is so certain, soothing with such conviction. “We can worry about that in the morning. You should get some rest.”

Hajime’s thoughts are slow; Atsumu is warm. He does not have it in him to fight. Exhaustion tugs. “Okay,” Hajime manages. Atsumu’s fingers card through his hair.

Oikawa did this to him once, Hajime thinks. The memory is there, beneath the surface. Hajime leans down into the inky pool of sleep, submurges, reaches out for it. Oikawa let him lay against his chest, he drew circles against the back of his neck, slipped his fingertips over his scalp. They were young. It was probably a Sunday, and they were watching T.V. in Oikawa’s living room. A V-league match humming along in the background; the white-blue fabric of Oikawa’s couch is soft against Hajime’s palm. He rubs it back and forth, watching the nap of the fabric shift colors. Oikawa gasps, because something’s just happened, the Toray Arrows have just scored a point, and as the whistle blows in some far-off place Hajime feels the soft pull of Oikawa’s fingers through his hair, the soft swelling of Oikawa’s chest beneath his cheek.

It is so easy to fall into the memory. It’s like falling asleep.

  
  


*

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I'M JUNE. HERE, READ [WEST.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25382200/chapters/61547764) NO BITTER. NO ABRUPT. JUST IWAOI. SWEET.
> 
> this fic is meant to be more of a thought experiment than the kind of story i normally tell. if it feels incomplete, it’s because even if it’s not canon in n:s:e:w verse, it belongs to it on some level. it ends abruptly and there is no resolution because the resolution exists elsewhere in my works. i would not allow something like this to exist if i did not already have a happy iwaoi verse that is somewhat compatible with it, and that people can go read right after if they don’t wish to end here. i don’t believe in telling angsty stories for shock value; i look at this as a hypothetical canon-adjacent dark chapter of the n:s:e:w puzzle, told a bit out of order. please read west if this ending feels heavy or abrupt or wrong in your heart--i know it would to me as a reader, and west to me as an author is a natural continuation of this, and the happy ending that i want (and have created) for our iwaizumi here. 
> 
> but if you just want to simmer in the angst? fuck the resolution? HELL YEAH.I CRIED THREE TIMES WRITING THIS
> 
> and for formality's sake: my name is june i'm 18 here's my [twitter](https://twitter.com/summersugawara) i love haikyuu. this began when i received a cc from [patrogay](https://twitter.com/dumbokuto) that read: "what if iwaizumi hooked up with atsumu because he reminded him of oikawa." and then i became literally possessed and spent the next two weeks writing the most difficult 9.5k of my life. this put me through the wringer. like, hooooooo! but the satisfying wringer. i hope it hurt you just as much as it hurt me. thank you to everyone on twitter who bullies me, this time especially elo, because she had to deal with 2 a.m. plot realizations in her DMs while i was also bullying her about her own work. twin DEVILS!!!!
> 
> till next time! sorry if it hurt! god knows i'm not done here!


End file.
